[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 418, entitled Sherry Holub's custom field approach to website design. It was published on Thursday, the 17th of April, 2025.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we get to the conversation with Sherry, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today's an interesting episode. I'm joined by Sherry, and she's here to talk to me all about her perspective on building websites and the way that she designs them.
Sherry has been using WordPress for a very, very long time. She's using custom fields to do all of the different bits and pieces on her WordPress builds. I'm sure that many of you have dabbled with this before, but Sherry has really leaned into it. She's not using anything other than custom fields, and she's not getting into using page builders or anything like that.
But we talked today about the creative process that we go through, how she manages clients, and how she manages the projects that they bring. She also talks about why she's got this particular process, and how she implements it all. And so I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Sherry Holub. Hello, Sherry.
[00:05:08] Sherry Holub: Hello Nathan. How you doing?
[00:05:09] Nathan Wrigley: Good. Thank you for staying the course. Sherry and I attempted to record this podcast a little while ago, and, and we had a fail from my end.
And, I'm really grateful that you've stayed the course and come back for a second ago. I really appreciate that. I. Yeah. I appreciate it anyway, but, we're gonna talk today a little bit about the life that Sherry leads in the WordPress space and how it may differ, from the life that you lead and the way that her business has been configured over the years.
Before we get stuck into it, Sherry, just a very quick, maybe one minute or something like that little bio about you and what you've been doing with WordPress over these many years. Just a, moment to tell us who you are and what you do in the WordPress space. So over to you.
[00:05:54] Sherry Holub: Sure. I've been doing this for a long time. Basically, I graduated from UCLA School of Art in 1995, which seems like an eternity ago. I. And didn't know what to do with an art degree. other than, I was very creative, but I wasn't like that, super highly proficient illustrator or anything.
So I was doing graphic design, on the side and I thought, why don't I just put all my eggs in this basket and kind of started, a small little agency. it was probably about 15, 18 years ago that we started using WordPress. Quite a long time. we were in the space of doing, basic websites of HTML, just plain old HTML, and then thought, there's these systems, these database driven sites coming out.
We looked at Jula, some other very early kind of things that I can't even remember the name of, but a lot of. Just PHP based database driven stuff. And then people were talking about this blogging platform and I thought, okay, maybe that has some potential. People were tweaking it a little bit, I. Creating websites off of this platform. And so we started messing around with it and we thought, Hey, this is a lot easier to modify than Jula. and since the beginning, the whole thing I hang my hat on is custom design. So we wanted something that was. completely customizable that we could plug in any sort of design to it.
So that's where WordPress, even in the early days, with the basic theme, we were able to tweak that enough to, insert our custom designs. So that's where it all started. And over the years we've looked at other things. But nothing, satisfied. That completely customizable need that we had.
Except for WordPress. the fact that it was open source and everything was just a bonus. and we've even had programmers come in to do custom plugins, when a client needed a special need, like very specific thing that didn't already exist or, we felt like, oh, we can actually program this better than the existing thing.
So that's as far as we've gotten into, actually. A plugin world, haven't actually put anything out for sale. It's all just for clients. But, basically, that's where we started. and how it evolved in the last five years, six years, I. I can't remember exactly.
time goes so fast now. we started using custom fields exclusively to build. so we came up with our own builder. And I say that because, it's, unique to each site, but, and it's not packaged like a builder, like a beaver builder or something like that. So we actually program it for each site.
But at this point, we have our code already done and we just modify it, tweak it a little bit for, each client. when we've showed it to people and we even showed it to the advanced custom fields folks, and they're like. This is not like what everybody else is doing. And I thought, really?
Why? Why aren't they doing this? yeah, the way that I see, A CF used a lot is on top of something else. Like they're already using other things and then they plug that in for something specific. And I think, where blocks came in is the blocks is of course, the now native new thing that they're pushing.
And we've tried, with blocks, but I think, we keep circling back to it and there's just a few things that we can't do yet with it. that kind of prevent us from going all in on it. But we're, playing around with it, 'cause we see which way the wind's blowing.
[00:10:23] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.
[00:10:25] Sherry Holub: But as long as a CF is still doing its thing and, we can still customize like that, that I think is the real beauty of WordPress. That, it's, customizable enough that you can use blocks or you can use a CF or another builder or divvy or whatever, and there's enough, You out there in the ecosystem that no matter what your flavor is, you've got something you can work with. So that's what I like the best about it.
[00:11:00] Nathan Wrigley: When you said at the beginning that you had a, an arts degree, was it literally paintbrushes and things on and on canvas. So you were painting things? Yeah. And, yeah. Okay. That's interesting. And then obviously, I'm guessing, excuse me, I'll edit that out. I'm guessing it's quite hard to generate.
quite hard to generate a career out of that. Obviously, there are some notable examples and they're very famous and what have you, who managed to do that. But for, if, everybody that went to art school managed to be an artist, we'd probably be deluge. There's not ma that many roles out there, so I'm wondering.
Does the internet, nothing to do with WordPress, but does the internet scratch the itch for you that you have around creating pieces of art? Because it feels like. When you look at a website that's really beautifully designed and what have you, you can get something close to that. But equally, the technical constraints and the fact that, you can't do everything exactly how you want.
You're limited by the, programming and you're limited by CSS and what's possible in browsers and what have you. I'm just wondering if there's any bit of creativity overlap there that meant that this was the career that you were always destined to end up in.
[00:12:23] Sherry Holub: it's funny because when I was younger and I was, sitting at my Commodore 64 typing in like basic and things like that, or, playing Infocom games, I was not thinking like that. I would be using a computer and there would be this thing called the internet and, all of that.
I just, I don't know why, I just didn't see that coming. And it just, as things evolved and the funny story, way back in 1995. My very first website client, came through a friend who was taking vocal lessons from one of the top vocal coaches in Los Angeles. That's when I still lived in LA and she said, yeah, Liz needs a website.
Can you do that? And I was like, sure. I, hadn't really, I messed around 'cause In another lifetime, I was actually a rave DJ in LA and, producing electronic music. So I, had put up a little website for that and I thought, yeah, sure, yeah, why not? I was just doing graphic design, but I'm like, I can do this.
she, we, I, built her that website and, She's still a client by the way, after all these years, which is awesome. But, I find that I use the limitations can bring out the creativity,
[00:14:04] Nathan Wrigley: Hmm.
[00:14:07] Sherry Holub: if you have to creatively, put branding into something, like how do you, do that?
where, you're taking concepts basically, and fleshing them out and making them real life. And then there's that whole marketing angle, which is, there's a lot of creativity involved there. There's a lot of psychology involved there. all of that blended together. The design, the marketing, the.
All of that. I think how you, solve problems is the creative part of that. So it's not necessarily just design and artistic, literal, artistic stuff, but creative thinking.
[00:14:52] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there's definitely loads of that. this is a curious side conversation, but obviously I interview people. That is what I do, and you and I are looking at each other on a screen, and I can see in the background the environment that you are in. And so
[00:15:08] Sherry Holub: Oh yeah,
[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: I get this, a lot and very often.
To the point where it cannot be a coincidence. There is some artistic material behind the person that I'm talking to, and typically that would be a musical instrument. that's a really easy thing to spot. it sits there, it's, there's a guitar, there's a cello, there's a violin or what have you.
Occasionally I'll see something like an easel, but I. I am very often quite surprised by the amount of people who I talk to in the WordPress space, web development space, who clearly have some overlap in their brain. I. Between cre, there's just some part of their, life which has to be creative and, it's visible.
It's on display, and I don't know if that's just a coincidence of the people that I speak to, but the proportion is very high, well over 50%, which is pretty remarkable really.
[00:16:07] Sherry Holub: That's interesting actually, that, and there's so many forms of creativity. People think of artist, and they typically think paintbrush paint and everything. and honestly even through school, there was, printmaking, there was, photography. I was really heavy into photography.
so a lot of different forms of just visual arts. But then there's, creative writing, which I do a lot of. There's music, there's, there's all kinds of different art. And actually you can't see, but I have, a djembe, I have, a little collection of drums back there, so y yeah, you're right on there.
You just can't see it. and I do have, some of my own stuff in the background.
[00:16:57] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It just, it never ceases to amaze me. the proportion is so high, and I do think that. You are, when you are given the role of beginning a new website, you are faced with a blank canvas. You've got what, basically is a, white screen. Otherwise, you're gonna end up with this white screen and you have to fill it up with things, and you have to fill it up with things which are going to draw people in again, get people talking, get people coming back, get people interested, and you've got color.
You've got depth and you've got shade and light, and in some cases, you can be involving yourself in music or video. That can all be a part of it. And so I do, I do think it is a very creative industry. However, all that being said, the. A lot of the creative stuff that I see tend often, this is going to sound wrong and I may have to undo some of the stuff I'm about to say.
It feels if you want to be really creative, those. Those tend to be big budget websites, enterprisey things where they've got the budget to experiment and explore and really play with the design and what have you. And I don't know if you've ever got yourself involved in that or is yours more like local websites?
And, if that's the case, do you feel a bit more constrained because of the budget and you everything's crowding in a little bit and it's tighter. You've gotta get things shipped quickly, so the creativity goes out the window a little bit, if
[00:18:27] Sherry Holub: like I said, the thing that I've always hung my hat on was the custom design part of it. it's like going to a bespoke tailor where you're not gonna get something off the rack. So no matter the budget, we're still focused on customizing a design for each project, for each client. And how we scale that back is, less bells and whistles, things like that.
But in addition to that, I also have low overhead, my office is the room above my garage. My, main programmer is out in Sedona, Arizona. She works out of her home. we're all, we don't have the high rise office. We're not the New York agency. I was never destined to do that.
I'm far more like folk art than I am museum. So that's part of it is we have low overhead and we also have been doing this so long now, 18 years with the same content management system and evolving with it. So we really know what we're doing as far as, the programming and the back end of it so we don't have to spin our wheels and put in.
Huge long hours on each project either. So the smaller project may just have less design overall. Like maybe, we don't do, four different kinds of, looks. but we may do that for larger projects where, they have, We've done sites where they have different divisions, of, the company and each one of those has a slightly different look and feel.
Or, we also do, full range of graphic design and stuff too. So that also bolsters the business where we can do. brochures and booklets and trade show booth stuff and, the whole nine yards. and on top of that, we've got our worry free WordPress maintenance that we offer.
So we've got, reoccurring income. I would say 98% of the people sign up for that. while I'm not bringing in a dozen projects every month, the projects that do come in become long-term ongoing clients. that's a bit of a tangent. But, the, we, there's many ways that we, can incorporate that creativity and.
Design out other things. like from the website, we also do all of the, the, branding or, the print materials. and, we, use creativity in each one of those things. it's not necessarily, that. we have packaged deals or anything like that.
Everything is custom with the design and it's just scaled back or scaled forward based on what those needs are of the client. And then, if it is a bigger budget thing, then yes, we may put in more bells and whistles, or it may include custom programming, like a custom plugin, something like that, and that increases the budget.
[00:22:05] Nathan Wrigley: I always think that, when you see somebody in some kind of flow state, and I dunno if you know what I mean by that, but where, somebody is absolutely bound up in the activity of the moment. And and I can see that in artists, somebody playing in a band or something, you just get the sense that they're right there.
But I've also had the same experience watching people who've just got deeply into. Programming and that same kind of thing seems to take them over. you get a deep sense of pleasure out of solving that problem, in the same way that somebody has a deep sense of pleasure performing or writing a song.
And, and so that was where the arrow of my question was heading. Really, it was whether or not you get that same. Feeling of creating websites that same sense of pleasure, and it's gonna sound tenuous at best, but do the constraints of things like CSS, which is, a very programmatic thing.
And it, it's almost I don't know, putting a, grid on your easel and saying, you can only paint. Things inside the grid, that's all you're allowed to do. and that would wick away fairly quickly, the enjoyment that you'd get out of the easel and the paint. I'm, wondering if that's the case with, design for you, or if you do, does it give you that sense of satisfaction and artistic creativity and license and freedom?
Him
[00:23:26] Sherry Holub: It does actually. And that is why even though I'm the, the founder of the company and all of that, I still do all of the design
[00:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:23:37] Sherry Holub: because that is my love, And at this point in the game where, I've been doing this for close to 30 years, it's almost second nature. And sometimes, it's a lot like other.
Creative pursuits where you're like, man, I'm just zapped today and I'm not thinking of the thing that I need to be thinking of, or, you'll take a walk or take a break or whatever, come back to it, sleep on it, so it's, a lot like other, creativity in that sense.
coming up with a creative way to solve a client's problem is what? What totally like lights my fire, I also love incorporating the marketing aspect of it too. And a lot of, I see a lot of design out there that's basically designed for design's sake, And design is separate from art. For me, if I wanna really do art, I'll break out the oil pastels or something like that and take a break and just get lost in that for a while, which is a totally different way to use my brain. I. But, yeah, the design has to have a purpose. What is the purpose of that?
And it's really the marketing, we are creating these things. People are paying us to create these things so that they can make money or reach their audience or their message or, I work with a lot of nonprofits, it's getting that message out, getting people. Emotionally involved to want to, donate, things like that.
And that's, I find that kind of a creative pursuit. how do I make this happen for them? what can I visually do for that?
[00:25:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I always thought that as a freelancer, one of, so it was a real relationship that was good sometimes and bad sometimes, and it was basically that whole thing of multitasking. So you've got many hats to wear, which on a day where you are feeling overwhelmed, that's. That can be fairly intimidating and a little bit horrible.
you've got, oh, you've got too many tasks to do. But then again, I always thought when the creative juices dried up. And for some reason you were staring at the blank page, like an author might describe. You've got that blank page thing. N nothing seems to come out. The creative bit of you is shot down for some unknown reason.
You can then flip into the non-creative tasks, which on some days might be the last thing you want to do, but on other days when the creative juice are not flowing, you can just go into. Okay, we're gonna do several hours of non-creative grind work, because that's part of the business as well. And so it was like this seesaw, this balancing act of, okay, that's good.
Some days, that's bad some days, but on the whole managing the whole thing is, quite a nice enterprise. Even though on some given day, some of those tasks might feel a little bit like chores.
[00:26:43] Sherry Holub: Yeah, there's definitely things that I'm loathed to do and I, try and offload those and it, but that took a long time to figure out that I shouldn't slog through this thing that, I don't look forward to. I don't enjoy doing it and it's not my forte, so I try and offload that sort of stuff, but, Yeah, you're absolutely right there. you can't be a hundred percent creative a hundred percent of the time. it's dips and valleys, and when you're not feeling it and you've got a deadline. You have to dig deep and come up with something. And, that's that. not to go on another whole tangent here, but that's why, I even tell other people in the field or my peers or whatnot, like that whole take care of yourself thing is so important.
I used to do the, the all-nighters push myself, Kind of thing. and you really burn out in not just a creative sense, but a truly a physical sense. And there was a year where I just, got everything that went around. I had the flu like twice, And it just, I just felt awful.
And I'm I can't keep doing this, that is an important aspect of, I think a creative person's work is, they call it the work life balance. And really it's, it is that, but it's, you just have to take care of yourself and prioritize, like prioritize sleep, prioritize downtime, and for me it's like getting out in nature, and away from screens,
[00:28:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I, can completely empathize with that. I think the more, old I become, which sadly is, a real fact of life for me now, I, want to have that sort of downtime and I want to be able to step away from it. However, I'm also very optimistic about. the way that the web is going, the sort of features that are coming into browsers and the new things that are coming down the pike in CSS and things like that to, to unlock, creativity in, ways that really, when I began, everything was tables.
The whole of your website was built with tables. you'll identify with this from some of the things you said earlier. the pain. And then, CSS came along and it did some of the things, but it wasn't entirely brilliant. And, in fact, CSS hasn't been. Particularly great in some respects.
You've have competing browsers with different standards, but it feels like that's all behind us now and, some of the things that are coming down in CSS in the near future hopefully will unlock a whole generation of people being creative online because it feels like it's the place everybody's hanging out.
nobody's really going out and buying magazines anymore. maybe they are where in your part of the world, but that whole thing of obsessing about. Every Friday you'd go down and you'd spend your money and you'd get a magazine and you'd flip over and you'd look at all the beautiful layouts and ponder how it was all done and what have you.
Everything now seems to be done through the prism of either a computer, a laptop, or a rec, or the, mobile phone. And, and this is the new, this is the new place to be creative. And I think, there is gonna be a lot of creativity in the, future. I hope so, at least. Anyway.
[00:30:11] Sherry Holub: I hope so too, because for a while there, it seemed a lot of the creativity was stripped out of things. the, we'd go through phases of it's just a very, white screen with giant font or one image or something. and I think, some of the newer, software and everything More aligns to that. in some ways, like the fast iteration. people may think I'm a total dinosaur, but I still mess with Photoshop, because one, I'm familiar with it. I've been using it since, 1993 or something. it's just something I know inside and out. But, some of the, newer things where you're not even opening a design software.
you're already iterating, you're in like the code or the program's doing it for you, the code part and you're just adding elements like color and typeface and things like that. I think the software, the process, the, all of that definitely changes what as far as what's on websites these days.
Also, the fact that there's so many pre-made themes out there. where it's somebody else's box essentially. And that's, that's a drum I've banged a lot is that, you are stuck in somebody's box. And the theme developers are, they don't know your business. They don't know who your audience is.
They are creating this thing for as many industries and audiences as humanly possible.
[00:32:06] Nathan Wrigley: know what you mean. I feel that we've had a, that not just WordPress, any piece of software that created things online, we were constrained by. Things like CSS and the, the, sort of div structure of everything in the, underlying HTML. And so we had a lot of cookie cutter sites, and then CMSs kinda really enabled that whole, anybody with experience or not gonna get something half decent.
But it, like you said, you fit in the box of whatever it is. So you fit in the box of the CMS, which then you've got another box in inside that, which is. Theme, and then there's probably boxes within those boxes. But I think WordPress at the moment is making real efforts to, obviously, we'll get into this in a minute, but with things like the block editor and, theme JSON and the capacity to, create your themes without needing to be skilled with any kind of code or code editor, you can do all of that inside the site editor.
and, but not just that, but also promoting. With things like the WordPress showcase examples of interesting, I'm not gonna say good 'cause you may like them or you may not like them, but, interesting design where, agencies and WordPress site builders have just done something which is a little bit different.
And, and I, think that is, I. That speaks to a future where design hopefully will get handed back and will become more creative and the burden of understanding. Okay. How does that work inside of a diviv and how does that work with the CSS? That will be less because it'll just be more point click drag.
Now, maybe that's good for, good for the world. It may not be, I don't know, in terms of accessibility, it probably rings some alarm bells and things like that, but it seems like a good idea, however. One of the reasons that we're talking today is because you, I was talking about the block editor just now, which is something that I'm very keen on.
You've gone in completely the opposite direction, but I don't know what your direction is. You alluded to the fact that you're using custom fields. Can we just dig into that a little bit? what is the builder that you have constructed in as much as you can describe it in words.
I'm curious to know what that is like.
[00:34:13] Sherry Holub: Sure. we realized with advanced custom fields that we could, code in our design in a more custom way, essentially, we weren't stuck in, a box where, the, template or whatnot within the theme as, okay, here's your hero image, here's your three boxes under that. we've come up with these kind of flexible.
they're very movable. You can move them around. and they're standard things like, okay, columns or, full width content or, yes, there's a hero image kind of thing, or a video background or whatever. But, we create a field for each one of these things and they have switches on them for, adding padding, adding margin, turning this off or on.
sections like background wraps, visibility wraps, just whatever we found that yard designs needed, we created a field for it. Essentially, and the, the sections themselves, can be added or removed from a page easily enough. We have a lot of clients who need special use case things like they're doing a marketing piece and they need a landing page, so they don't want navigation on the top.
So we created a switch to turn on or off the navigation on every page, on each individual page. it's really. We just found that it was a way to strip out a lot of the, bloat that we would see in some of the other themes or builders out there because they were kitchen sink things.
everything. But the kitchen sink is in these things.
[00:36:00] Nathan Wrigley: You are right. Okay. Yeah.
[00:36:03] Sherry Holub: and so we've slimmed that down and it's really only what's necessary to be, for the site that we're building or for, the near future use of a client. And most of our clients we found, donate, log into their sites.
[00:36:18] Nathan Wrigley: So
[00:36:18] Sherry Holub: the builder itself is easy. It's so easy.
[00:36:22] Nathan Wrigley: Is it a bunch of meta boxes then basically, so if I was to go into one of the sites that you have shipped to your clients, would I go to a page and then discover that there's the editor, but beneath the editor there's a whole smorgasbord of different fields? Okay. This is the content that goes in the header, for example, and this is an image, and this might be a YouTube video, and okay, you want another YouTube video?
Okay. Repeat that. Only this time replace the url. Is it basically fields?
[00:36:52] Sherry Holub: yeah, in a way, we're hiding the classic editor altogether, and we're, of course hiding the, Gutenberg editor. you start out with a blank page and all is the title field at the top, for the page. And then, There's a little prompt that, you could add sec, add a section, and when you click that, a little menu comes up that lists all the available things.
[00:37:21] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, I see. Okay.
[00:37:23] Sherry Holub: so it's, it's not overwhelming either. Even with the largest sites we've built, there's not 30 different things or whatnot because. Most everything will fit within columns or full width content or this or that. and if there's something very specific in the design, like a call to action that you want on, you can choose to either have it on a page or not have it on a page.
We just have a switch that says either turn it on or off, and we might tie that to a widget if it's the same call to action for every. Every scenario. So it just really depends on what, what the client wants and you know what's, gonna work for them and their goals and reach their audience.
And so that. There doesn't have to be design actually happening within the backend where you know, you're not, selecting different font sizes, things like that, or colors on your own. All of that is already built in,
[00:38:28] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. I think I'm getting an understanding then. So the, design, the way the site will look, the, CSS and, the, colors and the what have you, all of that is taken care of on a different level, and the client is basically just populating the content and you have constrained. The options that are available for this one particular client.
So I don't know if it's client A, they'll have these things available because in the discovery period we figured they're probably the arrangement of things that they need and client B. Over here you'll have a different set of things that are available because we figured out you probably want some videos and client a never wanted videos, that kind of thing.
And then they go in and basically populate the content into fields, which then map to locations. What within that page? Okay. I'm following. I think I'm following. Have I got that about right?
[00:39:20] Sherry Holub: Yeah, pretty much. they're, flexible in that you can move them around too. when we first started with advanced custom fields, we were building more like template type sites. we'd have a template for the homepage, a template for this, a template for that. And then we're like, that's it's too rigid. We need something more flexible.
[00:39:46] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:39:47] Sherry Holub: we started playing around with it, and now all of the fields and sections are movable. so yeah, it's, and it, and what's great about it too is that. if we do have a client who's gonna log in and make edits or blog or something like that, I can hop on a Zoom session with them and a screen share, and in 15 minutes they understand how to use this thing.
[00:40:12] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, okay. Yeah.
[00:40:14] Sherry Holub: it's super, super simple. it can get more complex. Like we, we were just finishing up a site now where the client. Is going to be, changing things a lot. And he wanted very, specific, things like, like, light green highlighting behind text and just whatever.
stuff like that. we had to code in a lot of these styles and everything, and. We do use short code a lot too for things like that where, we'll, style it in the style sheet and then give them a whole, little index of, okay, here's all the short codes you have, and we drop that on the, right side of the bar, for, each page so they can easily see which short codes are available.
occasionally we'll do stuff like that, but for the most part, this is just a really, easy, simplified kind of interface without, stuff they don't need.
[00:41:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it feels as if what you're doing there is you are literally, that you're just, inoculating them from all of the choices that they would have with a page builder. there's 1,001. Things that you could drag in. okay, let's drag 'em all in and see what they do. and obviously, things get balked at that point.
and the beautiful idea that you had for the design and the, the, relationship between the font size and the background image and things like that is all shot to pieces. So you are saying just put the text in there. And we'll take care of the rest. We'll make it look nice.
We'll make it h hover to the left or what have you, and give it a drop shadow or whatever it might be. you just fill in the fields and you're off to the races, and you want another one like that. Okay? Just do it again and off you go. And so you are stripping away that. that, that creativity from them, which is interesting.
but also I presume you are also mentioning inoculation. You are inoculating yourself from the client's desire to have a little bit of, fun and explore, which I'm sure we've all experienced where, you hand the site over and two days later you realize, oh, that doesn't look like, it did when I handed it over.
So you are immunizing yourself from that as well. That's nice.
[00:42:45] Sherry Holub: yeah. I still tell people that this is very flexible, the way they lay out a page or whatnot if they're going to be in there and doing that. But like I said, 90% of our clients, most of'em, are small businesses or, nonprofits, things like that. So they're very busy doing.
The, other things required of, their business
or their organization. So they actually appreciate, that they can lean on us and even, make content updates if necessary. because they're just, they're busy doing their thing and they realize that, they don't want that.
They really don't, yeah.
[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: It's a real testament though, to the myriad of different ways that you can do build things with WordPress. I am not a user of the software, but I am imagining that if you go to Wix or Squarespace, there's a way, there's the way, the prescribed way of doing it. But over on the WordPress side, you've got.
You could do classic themes, you could do full site editing themes. You could use Element or Beaver Builder Divvy. You could use the block editor, you could use your technique, build your own. And it's just up to you, however you wanna do it. And if you've managed to create a successful business with this, niche way of doing it, let's put it that way, it's not the sort of common way of doing it, then, then that's great.
And if it works for your clients, that's great. I think that's, a really interesting story. That's fabulous.
[00:44:46] Sherry Holub: the WordPress eco, ecosystem and what we've been doing.
but I've also worked with a number of clients who, they went the DIY route, they did the Wix or the Squarespace, and then they got, they hit a wall. Or even with Shopify too. 'cause Shopify is also huge. now, they hit a wall, they hit, and most of it has to do with frustrating, circumstances.
Like they can't figure out how to do this or something doesn't work right. Or, something like that. And they just, they're like, what am I doing, spending all of my weekend days like trying to mess with this site. and then they start looking for other options, and then they find us. And so a large percentage of, people, especially the small business or the solopreneurs or whatever, who find me, I.
That's their situation. they've, been down that road and they're like, we're done with this. We want, we just wanna hand this off to a professional who knows what they're doing. and, I've also seen, like small companies, corporate environments where they've had somebody in house.
take a site. And these are mostly sites that we then redesign because they're just a hot mess. And you'll find, okay, it's a divvy theme. They've stuffed Elementor in it. And also there's blocks somewhere too. I've seen this. I've seen Elementor Beaver Builder and blocks all happening on a single website.
So that's the pitfalls. If you really don't know how to use WordPress, I'm not gonna say properly because like we just covered, there's many ways to use it, but. There's certain things that you just should not do, and that is one of them. add multiple builders, people going willy-nilly with plugins.
just, and I try and train my clients that like, if you're going to install a plugin, especially if you're on our maintenance, please run it by us first because that's the only way we can guarantee that your site is going to stay functioning. a hundred percent. And. without problems.
And yeah, I've had a lot of clients like hire an SEO person or a marketing person, and suddenly something's added on the site and I'm like, what is this doing here? yeah, it's not that I, I. I'm putting the clinkers on you doing whatever you want with your own site. I'm just saying if you're paying us to manage your site, please just give us a heads up.
[00:47:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think it's really a great little story though about you just going in your own direction and figuring out. Over the many clients that you've figured it out with, that this just works. it's a system that is unique to you and maybe there's people out there who are operating something adjacent to this and can identify with it, it's just, it's worked for you.
It works for your clients. They don't have the overload of, 12 different interfaces to faff around with a myriad of different choices. It's just, here's what you get and it'll work off you go.
[00:48:08] Sherry Holub: Yeah, pretty much. And, I think there's space enough in the whole WordPress ecosystem for all of it, whichever direction people are gonna go. And, we are, we go back periodically and go, okay, how has blocks come along? Can we, fuss with it and make it do exactly what we wanna do?
so we keep checking in. maybe at some point, in time we may start using that exclusively, and when we figure out,
[00:48:40] Nathan Wrigley: there's definitely a lot of movement at the moment. The, problem I think maybe is that it's still quite a, quite, there's a lot of f flux, let's put it that way. things are changing at a fairly rapid rate and we haven't quite settled on the, UI for all of that.
So it, it is a little bit confusing, I think for clients if you're in the, on the inside of the baseball for. WordPress, then it's fine because you keep an eye on it and you know what's going on. But for the occasional client that logs in once every three months to add a. Thing suddenly to realize, wait, nothing's where it used to be.
[00:49:12] Sherry Holub: exactly.
[00:49:13] Nathan Wrigley: problematic. Sherry, unfortunately, time is the enemy. and we're gonna have to knock it on the head there, but, we say that in the uk by the way. It means we're going to end it. And, and I'd just like to say I really appreciate it. It is fascinating talking to you about the, the creative side of things and whether there's an overlap between your.
Your desire to paint and your desire to create things on the internet, but also your interesting approach to creating websites with, with custom fields. That's fascinating. Thank you for chatting to me today. I appreciate it.
[00:49:43] Sherry Holub: Lovely, lovely talking with you.
[00:49:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's all I've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed that. Very nice to chat to Sherry today all about that.
If you have anything to say, please head to wpbuilds.com. Leave us a comment, search for episode number 418, and we'd love for you to leave us a comment there.
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Okay, no doubt we'll be back for the This Week in WordPress show, which we host live every Monday. Hopefully we'll see you there. If not, we'll repurpose it and send it out to you as a podcast on Tuesday. We'll be back next Thursday for this, the WP Builds podcast. And all that I'm gonna do now is fade in some cheesy music. Say stay safe. Have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
